by Ellyn, Court
Thorn watched the advancing horde with an unblinking eye. “You’ve done your part. Drawn them out. Now your men are going to die. Is she worth it?”
The certainty of pain, of fear, of darkness swept over Kethlyn. Dire triplets, fast approaching. He gulped, nodded. “Victory is worth it.” Victory I may never savor.
Thorn’s grin was a bitter twist of the mouth. “Remember that when the blood and shit begin to flow, when your men begin to scream.”
He thinks I’ll turn tail and run. “This is about more than Carah,” Kethlyn insisted. “And we’re not budging.”
The bitterness faded; Thorn smiled at him with blatant pride and clapped him on the shoulder.
“But, Uncle, do hurry along.”
Thorn chuckled. “I’d like to stay and help. Sorry to leave you on your own.” He started to turn Záradel aside, but paused and said, “Don’t give in.”
To the ogres? To the Goddess’ judgment? He didn’t say. Kethlyn took it as a sign that his uncle preferred to see him live, and nodded.
Thorn rode down the slope and back through camp to muster the dranithion. Yesterday evening, he had pointed out a blue-tinged knob on the horizon and called it Brogula Kaem. His destination. Hadn’t looked like much, but Kethlyn guessed it surpassed Slaenhyll in height and bulk.
If things went according to plan, Thorn would travel around the eastern side of the Heights, below the foot of Slaenhyll, then bear west for the headwaters of the Leathyr. That path, he’d said, would keep him out of the treacherous bogs and bring him into the shadow of Direhead Ridge. As soon as he had found Carah and swept her out of the tunnels, he was to send Saffron. Only then could Kethlyn consider retreat.
Heralds raised curved brass horns. Quavering notes ululated across camp. Sergeants bellowed the advance. Butts of pikes struck the ground, followed by a roar: “Huzzah!” The human infantry double-timed it up the hillside. Miraji mounted sand-colored horses and dispersed, assigning themselves to different companies, their golden armor bright in the sun.
Kethlyn rode the opposite direction, trying not think of that efficient squire, that brawny pikeman, that quick-footed woman as corpses among the heather. Strange, he couldn’t imagine it of himself. His mental shield of invulnerability was a blessing, really. He dreaded the moment when that shield shattered.
Inside his pavilion, he read over the dispatch, crossed out a few lines, scribbled new ones:
Our distraction has proven successful. The true resistance has arrived. Though we are outnumbered, I am confident. As long as we hold the high ground, we will stand firm.
Uncle Thorn has departed for Direhead Ridge. He hopes to be in place by tomorrow morning.
If I am able, I will send another dispatch tonight.
For Carah, for country.
~Kethlyn
It was all he could do to avoid including words that hinted of his fear, a plea for his father to bring more men, and quickly. Drawing the ogres and holding their attention was his job and his alone.
He folded the thick, weather-resistant paper, melted a stick of red wax over a lantern and sealed it with his mother’s stamp. “RdL” the impression read. He had intended to give it to her as a sign of his surrender, but in light of his prompt arrest, he’d forgotten.
A small team of couriers waited on hand, lean, wiry riders who watched the marching troops with detachment. Kethlyn did not envy them the bruised haunches and exhausted limbs they would suffer as they galloped to and from Tírandon. Over the next few days, their route would be endless.
He waved the parcel. The nearest of the couriers strode forward to take it, vaulted into a saddle and was off.
With a leisure he didn’t feel, Kethlyn climbed into his own saddle and rode back up the hill to observe the deployment. A plethora of squires traversed the gorse-choked valley, gathering spent arrows. The placement of banners showed him that Leng had moved his command position to the far end of the valley. Squads of archers occupied hills to each side of him. Infantry raced up slopes to take position behind the archers. A pair of Miraji occupied each hilltop.
Arrows arched high, gashing the cloudless sky. “So soon?” Kethlyn whipped out the spyglass. Aye, the long stride of the ogres had brought them swiftly across the hills; they were already in range.
Kethlyn’s banner-bearer found him atop the ridge. The silver arrow whipped boisterously on its dark red field. “Ready when you are, m’ lord.” The bearer couldn’t be more than fifteen, and the banner made him a glaring target. There was not a hint of fear in his eyes. Kethlyn smiled.
From his vantage point, he glanced east and saw that his courier had stopped amid the endless grassland. Something was wrong.
A pan of the spyglass showed him an ogre holding the courier’s horse by the reins. The courier swung a saber. The horse tried to rear and break free.
Kethlyn cursed under his breath as a second ogre appeared out of quivering air and tore the courier from the saddle. An axe arced down. “No! Damn it.”
If he hurried, he could write a second—
The eastern horizon wavered as if a curtain of water hung before it. The curtain parted, unraveled. Ogres, row after disciplined row, marched free of the veil and into the stony hills. Banners, two dozen at least, showed a purple mountaintop, a curled dragon claw.
“Goddess help us. We’re surrounded.” Kethlyn’s instincts hadn’t lied after all. How do they know we’re here?
Overhead, a falcon carved a spiral in the sky, and screamed.
~~~~
30
The falcon alighted on Lord Daryon’s wrist. The leather jesses coiled through the avedra’s heavily gloved fingers. With his free hand he stroked the bird’s speckled breast. The falcon took offense to the stranger’s affection, lowered her beak and latched on to Daryon’s naked finger.
If the nip hurt, he ignored the pain and let the bird continue to bite. As his eyes closed, the falcon’s thin lids did as well.
Kelyn had watched his brother pull the same trick, watched the swell of Thorn’s eyes dart frantically behind eyelids, like one snared in a dream. Daryon’s did the same now as he searched the falcon’s memories. Fleeting, instinctual, they must’ve been, but if such a bird retained visual memories, they would be captured with the clarity, the detail, of a raptor’s vision.
At Daryon’s feet, the iron dragon grew inert, the light in its glass eyes dimming but not quite extinguishing.
They stood on Tírandon’s northern skybridge, the evening sky deepening toward purple, the Blood Star winking in the north, the moons flirting with one another across gulfs of twilight. Sentries walking the walls paused to light torches in iron sconces, then continued on their way.
The falcon’s handler leaned inquisitively toward the avedra, as if he expected the mystical mutterings of a augur. Blood began to well from Daryon’s finger, glistening around the edges of the bird’s beak, but still Daryon neither moved nor spoke. The man and bird appeared to be locked in a battle of will.
Kelyn knew better. His brother had explained the method of it. Physical contact, flesh on flesh, was the only way an avedra could see the memories of another.
Continual misgivings, like an itch in his brain, had prompted him to ask Daryon to scout out Kethlyn’s situation. He had received dispatches from his son, yes, but the worry wouldn’t settle. If he had learned only one thing over the decades, it was to heed these vague, malformed twinges of unease.
“It’s normal to worry,” Eliad had said at breakfast. He whose mistress had yet to birth his first child.
Sitting beside Kelyn at table, Rhoslyn had raised a truculent, tight-lipped glare. If he had the avedra’s gift, what demand would he have heard from her? “Don’t you dare raise a finger!” Or “Do something!”
He had recruited Lady Tírandon’s falcons a short while later. Waiting all day for the birds to return had been torturous. Duty managed to distract him throughout the morning. Foreman Dagni had readied a company of dwarves to march south for Athmar Br
idge. Kelyn saw them off, but once they disappeared, chanting between the hedgerows, the waiting crept in again.
This falcon was the first to return.
Daryon’s acid-yellow eyes snapped open. The bird released his finger, shook her head, and fluffed her wings.
Kelyn tried to read the news in the avedra’s face, but Daryon maintained a bland, imperious expression. He stretched his arm and the falcon toward the falconer. “Back to the mews with you.” Had the bird failed?
The handler took the jesses, and the falcon stepped from one thick leather glove to the other. The man cooed soft praise, stroking the bird’s breast. “What you expected from her, I don’t know. Tol’ ya it wouldn’t do no good. Birds is birds.”
Daryon flicked a hand, bidding the falconer be silent and be gone. The man huffed and about-faced for the far end of the bridge.
“Well?” Kelyn demanded. “Did you see something or not?”
Daryon watched the falconer and his bird recede. Only when they were out of earshot did he speak. “Your son’s plan is working. Extremely well.”
“What does that mean?”
Daryon dealt him a look as flat as a ruler slapping a hand. “It means your son is either brilliant or colossally stupid. Fire Spear and Black Marsh have sniffed out the bait. And it appears that Storm Mount and Dragon Claw have poured from Bramoran. Lothiar himself leads them. At your son’s rear. Bloodless bastard. Looks worse every time I glimpse him. Comes from living among diseased ogres, I suppose. Or—”
“Stop babbling! Tell me about Kethlyn.”
The avedra shrugged. “He’ll be overrun in a matter of days. If not hours.” He gestured at the falconer disappearing through the door of a tower. “Yet how long did it take the falcon to return with her memories? It might already be done.”
Kelyn strode for the tower stair. Daryon scrambled to catch up. The iron dragon heaved into motion, clanking hastily after them.
“My brother?” Kelyn asked, winding down the stairwell.
“The falcon caught no sign of Kingshield. He must already be heading north. If he hurries, the Evaronnans may not be slaughtered to the last man.” Was this sarcasm Kelyn heard? Was it meant to goad him or merely exacerbate his fears?
For the first time Lothiar appears on the battlefield. Out in the open. Exposed. Why now? Kelyn paused on the spiraling stair. “This is no coincidence.”
Daryon’s eyebrows jumped high. “Indeed.”
The two of them broke from the tower into a courtyard growing quiet with nightfall. Time to stir it up again.
“If I could find out so easily who is where,” Daryon was saying, “so could others. Your son did mention Lothiar uses magical means to spy and communicate. But, then, certain fish have slipped the net.”
Damnable riddles. As bad as Thorn. Kelyn grumbled as he climbed the steps to the keep. He had to be rid of this cryptic, vain avedra so he could think. “Send a falcon to Drona at Midguard Tower. I’ll send a rider to the dwarves. They won’t have gotten far. Retaking the bridge will have to wait. Send another bird to Johf at Graynor. We’ll rally as many as we can, converge all regiments on the Barren Heights. Lothiar might think to crush my son’s host, but we might be able to crush him in return.”
Daryon hesitated on the keep’s threshold, hovering like a question mark. “You … you want me to send for Little Fish’s aunt? They could be in league…”
Daxon was this fish he riddled about? Mother’s mercy, of course. But Drona? “As much as Drona despises Aralorris,” Kelyn argued, “she hates Lothiar more. She wants her lands back, and her way is the sword, not deals under the table. And Daxon, he…”
“…was caught sneaking over the wall instead of using the gate like an honest man? Yes. And you let him go.”
That was it. The unsettling itch that chaffed Kelyn’s ease of mind. That son of a snake! His lies had been as slick as oil sluicing through fingers. Kelyn could only hope that Lothiar had fed Daxon’s treacherous hide to the ogres.
If Kelyn’s own oversights cost his son his life, he would never forgive himself. “The falcons. Send them.”
The avedra grinned like a sawblade, acid eyes burning. “After that?”
“Prepare your Elarion to march.”
“The whirligigs?”
“Bring all of them.”
~~~~
The excitement spread through Tírandon in ripples. Cloistered high in the keep, Rhoslyn felt the disturbance belatedly. She was climbing out of a bathtub filled with cool perfumed water when her handmaid brought the news. “The army is amassing.”
“Tonight?”
Lura nodded and spread a towel for Rhoslyn to step into. The duchess didn’t wait to be patted down, but threw a robe on, strode into the corridor, and flung open the next door down. In Lord Lander’s study, the War Commander’s council collected about the oversized desk. Upon seeing Rhoslyn in her bare toes, cinched robe, and dripping hair, Eliad and Laral ducked their eyes, a substitute bow. Commander Sha’hadýn didn’t flinch.
Neither did Rhoslyn.
Kelyn’s eyes narrowed. He was prepared to stand his ground, no matter how loudly she protested.
“You’re interfering,” she said, keeping her voice calm, albeit chilly.
“I made a grave error in judgment, Rhoz. We have been betrayed. Kethlyn is betrayed. I am sure of it.”
She ventured toward the desk, fear groping through her belly. “What?”
Kelyn divulged no details. “Now he’s in trouble, and I’m sending help.” He was gazing at the map on the desk, avoiding her eye, being less than forthcoming.
“Sending—or leading?”
Rage built behind Kelyn’s eyes as he glared up at her. “I’m going to try to salvage my son. I don’t care what sentence you passed. Eliad, escort Her Grace back to her chambers.”
Eliad reached to take Rhoslyn by the elbow.
“Touch me, and I’ll see you never make bastards again,” she said, whirled for the door, and slammed it behind her.
She wasted not one moment. Back in her rooms, she dressed in her riding leathers and had Lura bind her hair in a tight damp bun at her nape. A change of undergarments went into a pillowcase, like those of a child running away from home. At the stables, she ordered her horse saddled, then rode the main thoroughfare at a trot. Lighted lampposts lined the street, guiding her past North Town and South Town. At this hour, mothers ought to be bedding down children, singing lullabies, but the streets bustled with people of all ages. Children ran amok, ducking through shadows, pretending to be soldiers and raiders. To one side of the thoroughfare, women in velvet; on the other side, women in thin cotton shifts; both wrung hands, hugged men and boys in uniform, waved, blew kisses.
Captain Reynal gathered Tírandon’s militia on the parade grounds, arms gesturing as he relayed orders. Squads dispersed, racing for towers and the battlements above. No drill, this. The castle’s defense was to be left in the hands of her citizens.
We could lose it, Rhoslyn thought, riding beyond the parade grounds. Lose everything we have gained. And for what? My children. One woman’s children. If Kelyn had further motive for marching from the security of Tírandon’s gate, she couldn’t see it.
In the bailey, the Fieran camp was largely empty, its regiments dispersed between Drona’s attempt to win back the Athmar Bridge and Johf’s journey to parley with Queen Da’era. Many of the Leanians had marched to Graynor as well, leaving behind a token brigade of light cavalry. But they mustered, all who were left, along with the Aralorris from Blue Mountain and Zeldanor, tearing down their tents and furling banners, blue and purple, orange and white.
Through the night-black tunnel of the gatehouse, Rhoslyn glimpsed manic activity on the plain as the Elarion dismantled their camps as well.
Though the moons were bright, lanterns swayed as squires ran, frantic to get last-minute orders just right. Hammers tapped, files rasped, as the cavalry outfitted their steeds with new shoes for a long ride over rocky terrain.
&n
bsp; Below the Bastion’s drum towers, orderlies buzzed about surgeon’s wagons. Drivers hitched teams of unhappy mules. Wainwrights greased axels and refitted wheels. Rhoslyn counted seven hospital wagons in all. The implications made her swallow hard. Kelyn was anticipating high numbers of casualties.
Queen Briéllyn pointed and flung orders like decrees. “I don’t care what Madam Sergeant said,” she called to an orderly. “Divide the crates of poppy wine and bandages between the wagons. If one wagon is lost, we’ll still have the supplies we need.” The orderly offloaded a crate and carried it to the next wagon in line.
Rhoslyn dismounted and tethered her horse to the nearest wagon.
Briéllyn spotted her lurking and raised an eyebrow. “We have more than enough volunteers.” They had not exchanged words since Kethlyn’s trial. It was plain to Rhoslyn that the queen resented the mercy Kethlyn might receive when everyone had vilified her own son. What mercy would there be for Valryk when he was found? Would a mother’s pleas matter then?
“Your Majesty,” Rhoslyn said, dipping a knee through a hasty curtsy. “If you would be so kind as to save space for me in one of these? I’ll be of use where I can, but I go primarily to ensure my husband does not interfere with the Goddess’s judgment.”
Was this the truth? She imagined herself standing between her son and a sword of celestial light arcing for his chest. But such a thing couldn’t be. She had to stand aside, let the sword fall where it may. But waiting at Tírandon for news would be the end of her.
A long while Briéllyn glowered in silence, wrestling with her resentment. At last she nodded. “You can ride with me.”
“You yourself are going? I thought surely Agna would—”
“No, the Madam Sergeant is not skilled with surgery in the field. I am. Kelyn requested I go.”
Rhoslyn lowered her voice. “I don’t supposed he told you what kind of trouble my son is in?”
Briéllyn shook her head. “Only that we must be ready to leave an hour before dawn.”